I used to have four 5850s and they worked alright, but they only had 4 gigs of gddr5 as a whole, so I upgraded a bit and bought three 7970s,

What it does is have them running at PCI E 2.0 x8, 1.1 x8, and 1.1 x8 sometimes detects 896 MB of total dedicated gddr5 across the 3 cards, sometimes detects 3072 of dedicated, and 2048 of dedicated this is a little annoying, i have a rampage iii extreme as my mobo.

When i had them in there, at first it would refuse to play any game and bsod with the ati thingy as the reason, now it plays with one card...

I also am trying to do my eyefinity of 3240x1920... when my 5850s would do it fine on med high w/o aa

Try using GPU-Z and see what that says. Maybe part of the memory is being turned off while not in use? I'm just throwing out ideas.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tom Ketchum

you need more then 6 gb of v ram for bf3 for maximum game, 2 cards doesnt cut it then, got three but, it's out of whack.

Adding more cards does not increase the amount of usable VRAM. 3x 3GB cards still operate with 3GB of VRAM. Each card needs to have a copy of the same data, so you get 3 mirror images on each card.

EDIT: didn't notice the GPU-Z in the background before, but its reporting 3GB, which is what your cards have.

Also, try running the game with CCC completely off. I had a similar issue with MSI Afterburner, where it would crash a lot of games it if was open, and read that a lot of similar programs can cause similar issues.Edited by mad0314 - 2/18/12 at 3:40am

you need more then 6 gb of v ram for bf3 for maximum game, 2 cards doesnt cut it then, got three but, it's out of whack.

Every card uses its own RAM and the card with the lowest amount of RAM will set the RAM limit for all the other cards.
This isn't an issue since they are all the same cards. So when it says you'll need 6GB for trifire, it means 2GB for each card.

6GB for each card is just insane

Why it only runs in x8 mode is simple. I suspect your mobo won't take more than 2 cards in x16 mode. Which is pretty common with 3 cards and a mobo that only has 1 or 2 16x slots. It doesn't impact performance that much (maybe 1%).

As for the RAM usage. If you're uncomfortable with this RAM you're using, you could install MSI afterburner and enable the RAM / GPU usage monitor. Start a game and check the usage. I suspect the 896mb is a bug.Edited by Xenthos - 2/18/12 at 3:52am

atimpag.sys likes to crash for bf3.........
it wants to crash at the large resolution and for even 1920x1080 takes for ever to load with these new cards and i think i get better performance with my 5850s..Edited by Tom Ketchum - 2/18/12 at 5:17am